Our Island of Epidemics by Matthew Salesses

And after the epidemic of unrequited love came the epidemic of unstoppably growing hearts. Our chests swelled up so we looked like peanuts, then upside-down pears, then hot air balloons. Our skin turned red from too much blood and we believed we would explode. But our bones reconfigured, and once our hearts returned to normal size we could make our chests bigger or smaller as we pleased. Some people liked this.

There was the epidemic of ganglions, cysts on our wrists and ankles made by veins that twisted and stuck together. We heard each other popping the ganglions by hitting them with books. It got addictive, the feeling of sharp pain and then adrenaline: fluid running off under skin.

We had an epidemic of lost voices, a period of itchy noised words that died in our mouths, and at first we forced out animal noises but then we began to like the break; some of us didn’t want to go back.

We had an epidemic of fainting and we got used to carrying each other home and waking to find ourselves cradled in another’s arms.

An epidemic of creativity rebuilt the town. And that’s what we were, a community. Before one man became immune.

We took stock of the man curiously: he was normal, so he was strange. He crawled up into the hills where it was cool and the wind pushed you down. He missed the epidemic of hairy backs and the epidemic of trusting hearts and the epidemic of benign tumors and the epidemic of magic.

After a while we even almost forgot about him, until someone brought up immunity like it might come down from the hills. Then one person said we would find his body in the water, sad and suicided. And we thought, Of course. That was the only way this could end.

About the author:

Matthew Salesses holds an MFA from Emerson College, where he edits Redivider. He is the author of We Will Take What We Can Get and short fiction in or soon to be in Glimmer Train, Witness, American Short Fiction, and elsewhere. Other stories in this series about an island of epidemics have or will appear in Cavalier Literary Couture, Hobart, PANK, Wigleaf, Corium, Kitty Snacks, Necessary Fiction, and Thieves Jargon.

• 
• 
• 

• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
•